[nzlug] Raid

[Paul Eggleton]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2007, Dirk Pilat wrote:
> What benefit would Raid give apart from extra data security (and maybe
> speed)?

I have multiple RAID setups at home because I have had drives fail - I think 
the count is up to 7 or 8 now over the last ten years. So far fortunately I 
have not really lost any data, because either it was mostly recoverable (ie, 
I was lucky) or the drive was already part of a RAID array. RAID has 
definitely saved me from data loss on a number of occasions.

In my setup, I dual-boot for gaming but I leave Windows on a single drive, as 
I'm not really that worried about losing data there. Linux lives mostly on a 
RAID-5 array powered by a slightly older parallel IDE 3ware controller. It's 
slow but it does the job, and as I mentioned it has already saved my bacon. 
Just this week I have also added a software RAID-1 array for extra file 
storage under Linux, prompted by the most recent drive failure. From 
everything I have read, software RAID under Linux should be pretty reliable 
(using md-raid as opposed to dmraid).

Of course I do still make backups, but I'd rather have RAID as well - then if 
there's a failure I don't have to worry about how long it was since my last 
backup. Hard drives are cheap these days, and software RAID costs nothing 
apart from a little extra work.

Cheers,
Paul